A very personal, and eclectic, collection of wargaming plots and projects; battles and campaigns... with pictures; lotsa pictures....

Saturday, July 18, 2015

Return of Army Men Project...

In the last several months since my last posting on this topic, I have been off-and-on continuing work on it. Recently I finished off the Commonwealth figures to form a scaled down tank-support (armoured infantry?) company.

Kiivar Armoured Infantry Company.
I should have kept the flash on in the subsequent pics:
The colours came out well in this. I thought it would be too bright.

The first thing to note is the range of uniform colours in the one unit. I'm not going the Green vs Tan route (though it will be a convenient division among many of the figures I have). But I have also decided I want to keep painting to a minimum for this project. So the uniform colours you see are simply the colour of the plastic: greens, browns, tans, beige, even greys. Aside from painting the details, the uniforms have merely been washed with Citadel shading ink 'Nuln Oil.'

Kiivar armoured infantry. The uniforms are 'self-coloured' -
the colour of the plastic - with a wash of Citadel 'Nuln Oil'.

The effect, to mind, is a rather pleasing polyglot appearance to the company, as if it has been in the field a long time, and operating hand to mouth.

The assault engineers might seem an odd attachment, but I figured I need to absorb the extra SMGs somehow, not to mention the single flame-thrower. I guess an alternative might be to add an extra SMG to each section, and add the flame thrower to the 'Weapons' Platoon. But I quite like the idea of the extra punch offered by the specialist assault section.

Below is the Nr 2 Platoon accompanied by a half-squadron of 'Cerberus Mk I' tanks. The cognoscenti will observe the uncanny resemblance to the British Centurion tank, except these look quite a bit smaller when measured against the (plastic) human frame. I have classed these as light-medium tanks: medium anti-tank, light armour.

Platoon with light-medium tanks.

The light blue numbering isn't very easy to read...

Below is the remainder of the armoured squadron, two up-armoured, up-gunned and up-sized Cerberus tanks. I'm still in three minds whether the are both MkII, mediums (medium anti-tank/medium armour), both MkII medium-heavies (heavy anti-tank/ medium armour), or they are MkII and MkIII - one of each AT/Armour classification.

The 4-tank squadron. T100 (farthest from camera) is the Squadron command.

To explain, the rule set I'm using for this project is my own 'One Brain Cell' set still under development. The are 3 grades of armour, and 3 grades of Anti-tank gun. Although, of course, there are other anti-tank weapons about: AT rifles, bazooka types, mines, AT grenades and satchel charges, they are rated according to my 3-tier AT classification. Even flame-throwers will have some effect on armour.

The vehicles are under-scale against these strapping fellows,
which I prefer, on the whole. But even within this company the figures
vary in size. This is not an undesirable thing...

At any rate, you can see that the two tanks added are considerably larger than the others. In fact Tank 144 is a whisker larger than Tank 100 - the difference is hardly noticeable unless they are side by side. But the difference between them and the T121 and T125 pair is very marked.

I had painted up the larger two in Raesharn camo, but that seemed to be heading for too much of an armour imbalance between the two sides. Raesharn already has a pair of 'heavy' tanks (Army Men Pattons) and a company of 4 'medium-heavies' (Panzer IVs which are, in Kiivar, known as Python IVs). Once the idea of up-armoured Marks came to mind, I had only to bite the bullet and paint over the former scheme with my Kiivar light beige and green.

Some close-ups...

The size differences among these 4 Centurions are quite noticeable in this dive-bomber's view...

To conclude this posting, may I express my thanks to readers' patience during the long 'interregnum' (interduceum?) whilst I recovered some of my morale and motivation. Cheers.

Looking good! The wash and helmets tie these together nicely. I remember my surprise at my first cadet summer camp when we were issued light weight "bush" uniforms inc shorts and knee socks w puttees as well as long pants. Unlike our winter battledress these came in every imaginable shade of olive green and tan, no 2 pieces quite the same.

:-) The grey helmets are about the only uniform thing about these guys. The smaller Centurions came with some other Army Men figures I haven't done much with as yet. As did the 25pr artillery, but Raesharn got those. At any rate, I did toy with placing these Centurions with my Tchagai army, as they were close to 1/72 scale, but I decided that it would be less hassle to keep them with this project. The larger ones came from Paul Foster. If any others come my way, they'll expand the formation, but I'm not looking very hard for more!

I had, rather regretfully, to redo the Centurions you sent me, but the the thing looks better coordinated now. Although Kiivar has more armour (7 tanks to 6), Raesharn has the heavier. I like dynamic imbalances...

I think they would do well enough for 'Crossfire' and similar rule sets (I'm trying to remember what the WW2 rule set Dave Blick used to use). They to tend to vary in size. The figures in the company just posted vary from big strapping fellas of 50mm down to your more wiry chappies at 40mm. I think my whole collection is like that. I find that in this scale the size variations look fine... giving the units more character.